by Colin Wilson
The answer was supplied by FBI instructor Mullany. He reasoned that if Mrs Jaeger could reduce David Meirhofer to tears by telephone, a face-to-face meeting might prove even more rewarding. Such a step called for fortitude on the parents’ part, but William Jaeger escorted his wife to Montana where she met Meirhofer in his lawyer’s office. He appeared totally controlled, and said nothing to incriminate himself. The Jaegers returned home, thinking the plan had failed; but they were wrong. Shortly afterwards they received another phone call – this time from Salt Lake City, Utah, some four hundred miles south of Bozeman – from a man calling himself ‘Mr Travis’. He told Mrs Jaeger that he was the man who abducted her daughter – but she recognised the voice, and called his bluff. ‘Hello, David’, she said.
Backed now by Mrs Jaeger’s sworn affidavit, FBI agent Dunbar in Bozeman obtained his search warrant. As the Quantico profilers had predicted, he unearthed the ‘souvenirs’ – body parts, taken from both victims – which proved Meirhofer’s guilt. At that, the man who had passed both ‘truth tests’ so convincingly also confessed to two more unsolved murders (of local boys). Although he was not brought to trial – David Meirhofer hanged himself in his cell – he became the first serial killer to be caught with the aid of the FBI’s new investigative technique. It was a breakthrough which, within a decade, was to lead directly to the accurate, systematic profiling technique known as the ‘Criminal Investigative Analysis Programme’, or CIAP – which today forms the NCAVC’s main weapon in the fight against these elusive, predatory serial offenders.
Under the stewardship of Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany (both of whom have since left the FBI), new names began to emerge during the 1970s as expert Behavioural Science Unit profilers in their own right. Among them were special agents Robert ‘Roy’ Hazelwood, now a leading authority on serial violent crime involving sexual assault; Robert Ressler, the then newly-joined instructor who had won his spurs in the pioneer Meirhofer case, and John E. Douglas. John Douglas, a strapping, stylishly-dressed man now in his mid-forties, was recruited into the FBI as a graduate from Wisconsin State University. Like Howard Teten, Douglas showed a natural aptitude for profiling; and within six years, while still in his twenties, he was posted to the crack FBI Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico.
He and Robert Ressler spent long hours of off-duty time in the latter part of the 1970s interviewing convicted sex murderers, thereby amassing a stockpile of common behavioural characteristics to feed back into the ever-expanding criminal profiling programme. In earlier years Teten, Mullany and the giants of the past had been forced to rely too much on personal investigative experience to supplement crime scene analysis, and so focus each new search for the type of offender responsible. Now the newcomers took this hitherto untried ‘short cut’ (of prison interviews) to build on the infant organised/disorganised findings. They sought subject material in whichever states they happened to be working at the time, and persuaded the interviewees to help solve such riddles as why some killers deliberately hide the bodies of their victims, while others just as deliberately leave them to be found by passers-by whose immediate reaction is to inform the police, and so raise the alarm.
The appalling injuries inflicted by some of the prisoners on their victims was already a matter of medical record. What the FBI agents now sought to discover was what caused the offenders to dismember, or ‘depersonalise’ these victims (beat them until their faces were unrecognisable) – many of them total strangers until the moment of the attack? Had the prisoners themselves been sexually abused as children or adolescents? Were they incapable of normal sex? Did pornography ‘turn them on’? What did their bizarre acts of mutilation mean to the killer who ‘signed’ all his homicides in this way? Why did some offenders torture live victims, and others mutilate them only after death?
All of it was interrogation with intent: the aim was to identify common behavioural characteristics peculiar to certain types of murderer. But they were all ‘gut’ questions, which needed to be put with rare tact. It was the first time that law enforcement officers had attempted to ‘read’ every facet of some particularly brutal murder through the eyes of the criminal responsible. Furthermore – as so often occurs in instances of unconventional research – the interviews were ‘unofficial’. Had there been any adverse reaction by way of legal complaint, say, or prison incident, the consequences for the pioneer researchers concerned could have been disastrous. Patrick Mullany (who became manager of corporate security with the oil giant, Occidental Petroleum, after leaving the FBI) was quoted in a 1989 newspaper interview as saying that these unofficial interviews ‘had the potential to crack back and hurt them badly career-wise’.
Fortunately, none did. The information gained from those early interviews was to prove invaluable, particularly in so-called ‘motiveless’ murder cases (i.e. where there is no apparent connection between murderer and victim). A convincing early demonstration of its importance in this field was afforded in 1979, during the manhunt in New York City for the killer of schoolteacher Francine Elveson.
Miss Elveson – a tiny four-feet-eleven-inches, twenty-six-year-old Plain Jane who suffered from a slight curvature of the spine – was found naked, badly beaten about the head and face and with her body mutilated, spreadeagled on the roof of the Pelham Parkway Houses apartment building in the Bronx where she lived with her parents. So severe was the physical assault that her jaw and nose were both broken, and the teeth in her head pounded loose. Her nylon stockings were loosely tied round her wrists and ankles, even though no restraint had been needed: she was unconscious, or already dead, when that was done. Her pants had been tugged over her head, hiding her battered features from view. There were toothmarks visible on her thighs and knees.
Using a pen taken from her handbag, her killer had scrawled a challenge to the police on one thigh: ‘You can’t stop me’. On her stomach it was four-letter abuse: ‘Fuck you’. Both the pen and the dead teacher’s umbrella were found thrust into her vagina, and her comb (also taken from the handbag) wedged in her pubic hair. Her pierced earrings had been removed from the lobes, and placed on either side of her head. Both breasts were mutilated, by cutting off each nipple and placing it back on the chest. There were no deep knife wounds: this suggested the killer had used a small weapon – a penknife, probably – and taken it with him. A pendant which the victim habitually wore, manufactured in the shape of a Jewish good luck sign (Chai), was missing – presumably taken by her assailant. Now the dead woman’s limbs were arranged in the shape of the pendant, as if to form a replica.
Francine Elveson was attacked within minutes of leaving her parents’ apartment-house flat shortly after 6.30 a.m. on 12 October 1979. Her body was found on the roof some eight hours later, after she failed to arrive at the school for handicapped children where she taught. The police report showed the attack took place as she made her way downstairs, when she was battered unconscious and carried up to the roof for the ritual that followed. Medical evidence revealed that she had not been raped. The cause of death was strangulation; she had in fact been twice strangled, manually first and then with the strap of her handbag. Lack of forensic evidence – fragments of skin tissue, fibres, etc. – under her fingernails indicated that she had made no attempt to fight off her assailant. Traces of semen were found on her body, but genetic fingerprinting was then unknown, 2 so that there were no apparent clues to the identity of her murderer.
Because of its bizarre features the case attracted much publicity, but despite intensive police investigation which included questioning some 2,000 people, checking on known sex offenders and patients undergoing treatment in mental hospitals, the search for Miss Elveson’s killer became bogged down. Finally in November 1979 the FBI was called in. Even the police investigators thought they were on a hiding to nothing. One experienced murder squad detective was quoted as saying, ‘Frankly I didn’t see where the FBI could tell us anything, but I figured there was no harm in trying’. Crime scene photographs, together
with the police report, autopsy findings, etc., were duly forwarded to the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit for analysis.
Enter special agent John Douglas, to profile the type of person responsible – from his desk at Quantico, some three hundred miles away. He knew from the police report that Miss Elveson, who was self-conscious about her size and physical deformity, had no boyfriends. That ruled out a lovers’ quarrel. Moreover it was spontaneous choice which led her to leave for work that morning via the stairs, rather than use the elevator. Those two factors meant it was a chance encounter between victim and murderer – yet an encounter with someone who promptly spent a long time on the roof mauling his victim in broad daylight. To John Douglas that meant he was no stranger to the building; he knew its routine well enough to feel confident he would not be disturbed during the ritual mutilation murder that ensued.
Again, the fact that he was in the building at that hour suggested someone who might live, or perhaps work there. And Miss Elveson – this shy, almost reclusive young woman who shunned men because of her appearance – had neither screamed nor made any apparent attempt to ward off a man who suddenly lashed out as they passed on the stairs. It had to mean that either he was someone she knew, if only by sight, or who was wearing an identifiable uniform – postman, say, or janitor – whom she believed she had no reason to fear.
The offender left ‘mixed’ crime scene characteristics, as many sex killers do. He used restraints (organised), yet left the body in full view (disorganised). He ‘depersonalised’ his victim (disorganised), yet having mutilated her body took the knife with him (organised). On balance, however, John Douglas classified him as a ‘disorganised’ offender, acting out a fantasy ritual which had probably been inspired earlier by a bondage article and/or sketches in some pornographic magazine. The FBI agent profiled him as white (Francine Elveson was white), male, of roughly her age (say between twenty-five and thirty-five), and of average appearance, i.e. who would not seem in any way out of character in the apartment building environment. Statistics pointed to a school ‘dropout’ type, possibly now unemployed. Because of the time at which it happened, the crime seemed unlikely to be either drink or drug-related. Francine Elveson’s killer was a man who found it difficult to behave naturally with women, and was almost certainly sexually inadequate. (The ritual mutilation provided the gratification he craved – a fact borne out by forensic evidence, which revealed traces of semen on the body.) He was the type of sex offender who would keep a pornography collection, while his sadistic behaviour pointed to one with mental problems.
He left the body in view because he wanted it to shock and offend. That decision was part and parcel of his implied challenge to the police, inked on the victim’s thigh – ‘You can’t stop me’. It ws a challenge which John Douglas believed meant he was liable to kill again, should opportunity arise. His profile stressed the importance of the attacker’s prior knowledge of the apartment building where the victim lived – and her apparent lack of alarm as they met on the stairs. Once the answer to these two, connected factors was found, the rest of the puzzle would slot into place.
Armed with the profile, the investigating police re-examined their list of suspects. One man in particular seemed to fit the description like a glove. His name was Carmine Calabro. He was thirty years old, an unmarried, out-of-work actor; an only child, and former high-school dropout with a history of mental illness. He had no girlfriends. He himself did not live in the apartment building where Francine was found murdered, but his father – whom he often visited – lived there and was a near-neighbour of the Elvesons. The problem was that it seemed impossible for Carmine Calabro to be the killer.
The police had interviewed Calabro’s father (as they had every other resident in the complex) before calling on the FBI for help. The father told them that his son – who lived elsewhere, and alone – was an in-patient undergoing psychiatric treatment at a local mental hospital, which appeared to rule him out as a possible suspect. Now enquiries were redoubled, and the police discovered that – because security was lax – patients at the hospital concerned were able to absent themselves almost at will. When they learned that Carmine Calabro was absent without permission on the evening before Francine Elveson was murdered, he was arrested – thirteen months after the body had been found.
Carmine Calabro pleded not guilty to the murder at his trial. However, the evidence given by three forensic (dental) experts – whose independent tests showed that impressions from Calabro’s teeth matched the bite marks on the dead teacher’s thigh – proved conclusive, and he was imprisoned for twenty-five years to life. The police had got their man, but this had been a further, impressive demonstration of the value of the FBI’s behavioural analysis technique when the law enforcement agencies are confronted by an apparently motiveless murder. Above all, it had been a virtuoso performance by special agent John Douglas, whose startling accuracy of profiling matched that of the legendary James A. Brussel in the case of the Mad Bomber twenty-two years earlier. Aptly, one of the warmest tributes came from the head of the police task force assigned to the Elveson murder investigtion, Lieutenant Joseph D’Amico. ‘They had [Carmine Calabro] so right’ he said, ‘that I asked the FBI why they hadn’t given us his phone number too.’
Official recognition of the importance of the FBI’s new investigative technique soon followed. In 1982, the Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico received a grant of 128,000 dollars from the National Institute of Justice to extend the practice of interviewing convicted, incarcerated offenders. More FBI agents – some from outside the Behavioural Science Unit, specially trained for the task – were brought in and a mass survey of convicted, incarcerated murderers was begun. Its objective was to develop and expand the emergent criminal profiling technique: and since the organised/disorganised classification of offenders from crime scene evidence was law enforcement’s principal weapon in applying that technique, it was here that the main thrust of the research was directed. The flood of information emanating from these prison interviews helped: one, to enumerate common behavioural charcteristics in convicted sex killers (in whose ranks America’s serial killers were to be found), and to relate those characteristics directly to crime scene evidence; two, to identify significant differences in the crime scene behaviour of organised and disorganised offenders; and three, to highlight specific characteristics (sociological, environmental, etc.) which could be used statistically to profile the type of offender responsible for a particular crime.
The FBI lists five categories of murder. They are felony murder (committed during the commission of a felony or serious crime, such as armed robbery, hijack, arson, etc.); suspected felony murder; argument-motivated murder (as distinct from criminally-motivated homicide, domestic dispute, etc.); murder committed for ‘other motives’ (any identifiable motive not included in the first three categories); and murder committed for ‘unknown’ motives. Many sex murders may wrongly be included in this last category, since the underlying sexual motivation is often difficult to recognise by any but the trained observer.
The lowest denomination, i.e. the murder of one person in circumstances unrelated to any other murder, is classed as ‘single homicide’. Similarly, two victims in the one location and in the course of an otherwise unrelated event is a ‘double homicide’, and three victims murdered in like circumstances a ‘triple homicide’. However, when four or more persons are murdered in one location in an otherwise unrelated event, the classification is upgraded into two categories, ‘family’ and ‘classic’ mass murder.
Family mass murder, as the name implies, is the killing of four or more members of one family by another member of that family. The most bizarre case in contemporary American crime history is the alleged murder by John List, a New Jersey insurance salesman and former Sunday-school teacher, of his mother, his wife and their three children in 1971. List disappeared from his eighteen-roomed mansion in Westfield, New Jersey, on the night of 9 November 1971 when – according to the po
lice – he shot dead his entire family with a 9mm automatic pistol. The five murders remained undiscovered for a month. When found, the bodies lay side by side on sleeping bags in the front room, as if in an undertaker’s parlour. Their heads were covered, their arms folded across their chests. Four of the victims had been killed by a single shot, behind the left ear. The fifth – the Lists’ second son, John, aged fifteen – had ten bullet wounds to the head and body.
A police search of the house then revealed a five-page ‘confession’ allegedly written by the missing John List Snr. Two days later his car was found, abandoned in a car park at Kennedy airport in neighbouring New York. The contents of the ‘confession’ were not disclosed, although the police described them as a ‘play by play’ account of what List had done, and why. Press reports said he was in financial difficulty at the time, and had been siphoning off cash from his mother’s account.
Nothing more was heard of List for eighteen years. Whether he was alive or dead was uncertain, but there were indications of careful planning and he was placed on the FBI’s wanted list as a federal fugitive. Then in June 1989 a television reconstruction of the New Jersey family mass murder – shown on the top-ranking ‘America’s Most Wanted’ programme – screened two facial likenesses of how John List (by then aged sixty-three) might look after eighteen years on the run. One likeness was a sculpture, the other a robotic, computer-built ‘photograph’.
The bust, which proved to be incredibly accurate, brought three hundred telephone calls to the FBI from viewers who identified the person portrayed as ‘Robert Clark’, an elderly married man then living in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia. When interviewed, ‘Robert Clark’ (who had married a woman from Denver, Colorado, in 1977) denied he was John List, but was subsequently finger-printed and arrested. Within hours, the family mass murder case took a dramatic new turn. An FBI spokesman announced that the Bureau was reopening its file on the United States’ most wanted hijacker – a man hitherto known only as ‘D.B. Cooper’.